Washington Post hits Harris over ‘populist gimmicks’ in economic proposal

The Washington Post Editorial Board on Friday slammed Vice President Harris over her newly-announced economic agenda, which they characterized as “populist gimmicks.”

“Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech Friday was an opportunity to get specific with voters about how a Harris presidency would manage an economy that many feel is not working well for them,” the board wrote in an editorial Friday. “Unfortunately, instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”

Harris formally announced her economic plan at a Friday rally in North Carolina, which included a broad range of economic policies including child and home-owner tax credits, as well as a federal ban on price gouging on groceries.

The agenda takes aim at the economy, which has been defined as the key policy issue of the 2024 presidential election, and the campaign said that her proposals will be priorities for the first 100 days in a Harris White House.

While Harris hoped to inspire Americans facing elevated inflation levels, the Washington Post’s editorial board was left unsatisfied. The board acknowledged that Harris needed to acknowledge prices, but came down on her for scapegoating the issue, in their view.

“One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it,” they wrote. “The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business.”

Among her announced policies is a ban on price gouging, which Harris said would have the Federal Trade Commision go after corporations in the grocery industry. The editorial said this proposal in particular was “vaguely defined” and was unclear on what excessive profits meant for an industry with relatively low margins.

The editorial board did laud Harris on many of her plans, however. They praised her plan to build three million new homes over the next four years to address the country’s affordable housing crisis. They also voiced support for increases in the child tax credit as a “highly effective anti-poverty policy”  and expanded tax breaks for low-income “front-line workers” without children.

Although they supported those policies, the board also pointed to concerns over the cost of her plan, citing Harris’s insistence that her White House, like Biden’s, would not raise taxes on households earning less than $400,000 annually. The editorial cited an estimate that the full plan would add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The editorial board did concede that every campaign makes “expensive comments,” but doubled down on its distaste towards Harris’s plan.

“Even adjusted for the pandering standards of campaign economics, however, Ms. Harris’s speech Friday ranks as a disappointment,” the piece concluded.